With a change in their India leadership and the introduction of their premium brand with a solid pipeline, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts has an interesting and very busy year ahead. ET HospitalityWorld caught up with Dimitris Manikis, president EMEA, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Rahool Macarius, the market managing director, Eurasia at the company on the sidelines of HICSA 2025.
“It’s very exciting to have Rahool on board—he is a safe harbour for Wyndham. It’s early days but he needs to bring a different dimension to the job. When he left us, two-and-a-half years ago, the company was not the same. We are evolving all the time,” Manikis said about his new colleague.
Manikis who is a firm believer in the India market felt that there was a great deal of optimism in the market which was going to continue and the company was growing and adding new owners for what should turn out to be a stellar year.
“We see interesting moves from our competition. We see new hotels coming in. We see a lot of unbranded hotels turning to brands for a number of reasons. When you put all of that into the equation, it looks very positive. The sun is shining over India,” he said.
There was a need to stop talking about hotels and start to speak about rooms, Manikis felt, in the time ahead. The idea was to start opening bigger assets and build bigger boxes and have a bigger presence in the country.
“We opened 11 hotels last year. We have a very healthy pipeline. We’re bringing Windham Grand to Udaipur by the end of this year. It’s very exciting times,” he said, adding on the subject of infrastructure, “I still believe that what happened in North America, will happen in India.”
Macarius began by speaking about his earlier stint with Wyndham which was a six-and-a-half year stretch during which he set up their national sales initiative because of his firm belief that 85 percent of the business would be generated domestically.
“I believe that 85 percent of our business is domestic, and in the franchise world, it is not something which is easy. Our growth in the last eight years has been phenomenal, faster than our competitors. But we can’t rest on our laurels. There are plans in play for the future which we will not announce. A lot of business strategies of ours have been copied. We’ve always said that with the right owners, with the right asset, we will improvise as well when the right opportunity comes,” Macarius said about the future strategy of the company in India.
While they officially follow a franchise model, it was more ‘manchise’ or managed franchise, he added, something that other hotel companies who tow the management contract line are also doing in the India market.
